Jira review 2026: explore Atlassian's agile project and issue tracking tool, its Scrum and Kanban boards, AI features, pricing tiers and alternatives.
Jira is Atlassian's project and issue tracking software, built originally for software development teams practicing agile methodologies and now widely used by product, IT, marketing and operations teams for planning and tracking work of any kind. It was Atlassian's first product and remains the company's most recognized offering, underpinning workflows for hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide.
Founded in 2002 in Sydney, Australia by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, Atlassian famously bootstrapped its early years without venture funding before going public on NASDAQ in 2015. Jira today ships as a cloud-first SaaS product with configurable workflows, Scrum and Kanban boards, and increasingly deep AI features layered in through Atlassian Intelligence and Rovo.
Jira's agile toolset centers on Scrum boards for sprint planning, burndown charts and velocity tracking, and Kanban boards for continuous-flow work with WIP limits and cumulative flow diagrams. A shared backlog lets teams prioritize and groom upcoming work before it enters a sprint, while Advanced Roadmaps helps larger organizations coordinate dependencies across multiple teams and projects on a single timeline.
No-code automation lets teams trigger status changes, assignments and notifications based on configurable rules, with usage allowances that scale from 100 monthly runs on the Free plan up to unlimited on Enterprise. Atlassian Intelligence and Rovo AI agents extend this further, drafting issues from natural-language prompts, summarizing long threads, and suggesting new automation rules, while deep integrations with Confluence, Bitbucket and CI/CD tools like Jenkins keep engineering workflows connected end to end.
Jira uses a per-user-tier pricing model. The Free plan supports up to 10 users with core issue tracking, Scrum and Kanban boards, and 2GB of storage; Standard costs 7.91 dollars per user per month for up to 300 users; and Premium costs 14.54 dollars per user per month, adding Advanced Roadmaps, unlimited storage and 24/7 support.
Enterprise pricing is custom, billed only on annual contracts, and adds organization-wide security controls, unlimited automation and centralized administration for large deployments. Atlassian is winding down self-managed Jira Data Center, ending new license sales on March 30, 2026 and reaching end of life on March 28, 2029, which is steering most new and existing customers toward Cloud or Enterprise Cloud plans.
Yes. Jira's Free plan supports up to 10 users with core issue tracking, Scrum and Kanban boards, a shared backlog, and 2GB of storage.
Jira is developed by Atlassian, a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: TEAM) founded in 2002 in Sydney, Australia by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar.
Standard costs 7.91 dollars per user per month and covers core agile features for up to 300 users, while Premium costs 14.54 dollars per user per month and adds Advanced Roadmaps, unlimited storage and 24/7 support.
Yes. Jira natively supports both Scrum boards, with sprints and burndown charts, and Kanban boards, with WIP limits and cumulative flow diagrams.
Atlassian is ending new license sales for Jira Data Center on March 30, 2026, with full end of life on March 28, 2029, pushing customers toward Jira Cloud.
Common Jira alternatives include Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp, Linear, GitHub Issues and Azure DevOps, each varying in configurability, agile depth and ease of use.